The UK’s Observer reports that “a dose of PT-141 results, in most cases, in a stirring in the loins in as little as 15 minutes. Women, according to one set of results, feel ‘genital warmth, tingling and throbbing’, not to mention ‘a strong desire to have sex.’” And for the Mr. Rights (and Mr. Right Nows) among you, it can help you, too!

Though some don’t see the spray as a help at all. Critics say it will lead to what The Observer calls “McNookies“:

quick, easy couplings low on emotional nutrition. Sex lives tailored to the demands of a jealous office or an impatient spouse. A dark age of erotic self-ignorance tarted up in the bright-coloured packaging of a Happy Meal.

And another critic, Leonore Tiefer, a psych prof at New York University School of Medicine, worries that it might make people’s sex lives even more screwed up (so to speak) than they already are. The Observer says,

For Tiefer, striving to understand yourself is the sexiest sort of autonomy there is, and nothing betrays that autonomy like handing over the job to someone else, whether it’s your lover, your doctor, or, worst of all, big pharmaceutical companies.

Amazingly, tests on rats bear this idea of autonomy out. Female rats who were given a Room of One’s Own (a tiny hole that allowed them to squeeze away from their lusty lover into a connected chamber) actually displayed a libido lift similar to PT-141′s, reported The Observer. (And if you’re wondering how a female rat shows a strong libido, think back-arching, ear wiggling, face-kicking, and, in rare cases, mounting.)

So it seems sexual autonomy and self-knowledge really are the keys to a good sex life. Not something that comes in a slender white plastic package. Though it occurs to me that some such plastic items do give a woman quite a bit of sexual autonomy. Mhmm…

Jean Enersen aside, if it’s hard for you to take all this seriously, one blogger on Digg suggested: “Six gallons of this, a chemical sprayer, and Times Square = Weapons of Mass Reproduction.” Another replied: “Indeed, years from now we will be recalling the Instantaneous Times Square Mega-orgy of 2006.”